UC Press Blog

By James Ron, author of Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel

Twenty-two years ago, I published a book with the University of California Press predicting much of what we see today in Gaza. 

My path towards writing that book was torturous. 

In 1976, I moved to Israel from the US as a nine-year-old and was desperate to belong. As part of that effort, I volunteered in 1985 for a special unit of the Israeli parachute brigade, serving three years in regular service, and then another few years in the reserves. 

In the 1990s, I worked as a reporter for the Associated Press in Jerusalem and then as an investigator for Human Rights Watch. I had begun to suspect something was badly amiss in Israel, where both the government and society’s disregard for Palestinian well-being was making me increasingly uncomfortable. 

In 2003, after studying at Stanford and Berkeley, I published Frontiers and Ghettos: State Violence in Serbia and Israel. 

The book used sociological theory and cross-national comparisons to speculate on the conditions under which the unthinkable might occur. I used comparisons between Israel and Serbia to search for a hypothetical trigger that might tempt Israel to engage in the most awful forms of violence against Palestinians, akin to Serbia’s covert operations in Bosnia. 

Some of the book’s worst fears have come to pass. Israel today stands accused of genocide in Gaza, and its government is openly discussing plans to ethnically cleanse the Strip of its Palestinian population. Just as I feared 22 years ago, Israel launched a horrible war of devastation against a sizeable portion of the Palestinian people. 

While the book's basic prediction has been borne out, however, it did not get everything right. For example, I mis-specified the probable trigger for intense Israeli state violence. Drawing on the Serbian experience in Bosnia, I hypothesized that an international attempt to force Israel to withdraw from the West Bank would encourage Jewish right-wing settlers to initiate a wave of ethnic cleansing, likely with clandestine government support. 

Things did not unfold that way, however. Instead, the Israeli radical right took over the government wholesale in democratic elections, obviating the need for backroom dealings. The epicenter for the government’s attack, moreover, was Gaza, not the West Bank. And finally, the trigger for the onslaught was not international pressure, but rather Hamas's brutal attack on October 7, 2023, along with its violent seizure of hundreds of Israeli hostages. That Hamas attack was a horrific crime of immense proportions.

Once all that occurred, things evolved more or less as I feared. The Israeli military was transformed into an instrument of horrific suffering, engaging in activities that violate almost every clause of the Geneva Conventions. 

In the first weeks and months after the Hamas attack, some of Israel's military operations may have been justifiable under the laws of war. Even the most damaging air or artillery strikes can be legal if they are proportionate and discriminate, and reasonable precautions are taken to protect civilian life. 

Increasingly, however, it has become clear that many of Israel's actions in Gaza are war crimes, as documented by Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai, among others. Several Israeli leaders, including a former prime minister, have openly acknowledged this fact. We also have reports by Israeli groups such as B'Tselem and its partner, Physicians for Human. Rights-Israel, as well as from the courageous Israeli daily, Ha'aretz. 

Many Israeli soldiers have not directly committed war crimes. The children of my friends serve in Gaza, and if their parents have had any influence on them, these youngsters will not commit atrocities. Overall, however, the Israeli military has collectively engaged in a crime of vast proportions, and anyone who is part of that system, no matter how individually honorable, cannot avoid being pushed, prodded, and pulled into this criminal endeavor. 

At this moment, the starvation unfolding in the Strip is my greatest shame. One can always claim that this or that airstrike was justified because it targeted a Hamas military position, but the denial of food to an entire civilian population is never justifiable. 

Israelis may not see it now, immersed as they are in their collective trauma in which the only thing that truly matters is the well-being of Israeli hostages and soldiers. 

That immersion, however, is a self-defeating bubble. 

Eventually, Israel will be forced to recognize the full horror of what it has done to Palestinian Gazans, and when that happens, the stench of collective shame may prove impossible to wash off.